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How can gaseous abundance in ppm be converted to density?

I think the ppm figure means mole fraction. So, if the CO2 concentration is 400ppm it means the mole fraction for this species is $x=400\times 10^{-6}$. Suppose the mole fraction of the ith species is ...
Stephen Blake's user avatar
3 votes

Is the atmospheric composition still changing naturally?

Yes the atmosphere is always in mild flux, humans are just changing it MUCH more severely than it does naturally. the atmosphere even changes from season to season, that is the little up and down on ...
John's user avatar
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2 votes

Why is CO₂ abundance in the atmosphere still small?

"Small" is a vague and slippery term. There is now a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere than there was a century ago and that change has consequences, especially to climate stability. There is a ...
Ken Fabian's user avatar
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20 votes

Why is CO₂ abundance in the atmosphere still small?

As well as the atmosphere having a lot of mass, there are many processes which remove CO2 from the atmosphere, see the wikipedia article for the carbon cycle. Plants sequester it as biomass, some of ...
llama's user avatar
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23 votes
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Why is CO₂ abundance in the atmosphere still small?

The mass of the atmosphere is 5.1 × 1018 kg, which is 5.1 × 1015 t. As stated in the edited question, industries emits 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, That's 1.5 × 109 t. The ...
Fred's user avatar
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2 votes
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Why does relative vorticity in spherical coordinates have an extra term as compared to the usual cartesian derivation?

The best way to see this extra term is to consider a bug moving along a latitude circle at constant speed $|u|$ in a constant direction arounf the poles. If the bug is moving along a geodesic then ...
Oscar Lanzi's user avatar
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